The Power of Persistence: Education System ... - EQUIP123.net

A final perspective on ownership, as well as capacity building, is whether
ownership is an individual or an institutional factor. In real life terms, ownership
is almost always related to individuals’ embrace of the value of activity. At the
school level, the principal and teachers accept, internalize, and promote new
educational approaches. At the district level, individual supervisors rethink
their role in terms of pedagogical support rather than administrative control,
and recast their daily work and skills accordingly. At the national level, Ministers
and senior managers develop personal ownership of key concepts and policies
of reform, and actively promote them, and a culture of using information for
evidence-based decisions is reinforced. In this sense, reculturing is a deeply
personal process as well as an institutional one that is reinforced and deepened
over time.
Experienced practitioners will immediately recognize the fragility of the
process described above. Even in countries where political leadership changes
only every few decades, the top education leadership may change frequently.
In democracies, such change typically happens on regularly scheduled intervals.
More locally and, perhaps, more importantly, principals and teachers may
rotate through schools every few years. Specialized technocrats in information
management, policy analysis, or IT may be hired away by the private sector
or donor community. With each change, the ownership process resets, and
new policy directions are possible. The process of developing deep ownership
is always a balance between catering to the individuals holding positions of
authority today, and promoting an institutional ownership that goes beyond
individual preferences. At any given point in time, ownership by one Minister
may become a liability to the next administration.
Sustainability
One of the most visible, politically important, and yet misunderstood concepts in
development is sustainability. For the donors, sustainability is often the standard
against which success is measured—either implicitly or explicitly. In spite of its
considerable importance as the rhetorical standard of effectiveness, sustainability is
seldom explicitly defined and measured by donors (Chapman and Quijada, 2008).
The claim that development projects are unsustainable is often used as a
powerful argument against international assistance programs. The search for
sustainability has contributed to numerous aid ‘reforms’ that are really premature
interruptions in programs in an effort to transfer financial responsibility to the
recipient country. This causes them to be less effective than they might have been,
contributing to a circular argument that reforms are not effective or sustainable.
Sustainability is often measured against one of two criteria: continuity of
SECTION 1: INTROdUCTION
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